Strangely, Mac OS X has a wide variety of great text expansion apps and everyone does the job well. That said, aText is our favorite thanks to its comprehensive feature set, great performance, and reasonable price.

Features

Type a short snippet that can expand to styled or unstyled text of virtually any length (and include pictures)

Insert several types of variables into snippets, including date, time, other snippets, the clipboard, and more

Create snippets that receive input from fillable forms

Create snippet groups that respond to input in different ways

Specify special behaviors for specific applications

Easily back up your snippets to any folder

Expand by typing or by choosing a snippet from the menu

Invoke AppleScripts and shell scripts

Reposition the cursor in a snippet so you're typing where you want to post-expansion

Emulates key presses (e.g. tab, backspace, etc.)

Import data from TextExpander, TypeIt4Me, and Automaton Typer

Where It Excels

Despite the very low price for aText ($5), it's remarkably comprehensive. It offers mostly the same feature set as bigger apps like TextExpander for a fraction of the cost. Text expansion works as expected, you can specify when specific groups of snippets should expand, and you have the ability to include so many variables that one little snippet could, potentially, create a unique letter or document. If you use another text expansion app, there's a good chance aText imports its data. It doesn't cost much, it does practically everything, it's simple to use, and it's easy to switch from other popular solutions if you're interested.

Advertisement

Where It Falls Short

While aText isn't short on features, one notable omission is the ability to sync snippets. While you can specify a backup folder, to which aText saves a backup of your snippets at a specified interval, you can't choose where it actually saves the original copy. This means you can't sync with services like Dropbox or Google Drive, making aText a somewhat less-desirable choice for those with multiple computers. Personally, I use it with two machines but find it a bit of a hassle to manually make the updates. That said, it's a small price to pay when you're already getting so much for such a small price. Additionally, Tran (the developer) tells me that syncing support is a forthcoming feature so it shouldn't be long until this isn't an issue at all.UPDATE: aText received an update that now allows syncing via any folder syncing service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

The Competition

TypeIt4Me ($5) was our former top pick. It packs quite a punch for $5, too, but doesn't offer as many variable options (like fillable forms) as aText. It does offer a number of unique features like autocorrect, however, so it's worth a look if you want something a little different from most of the competition at a very low price.

Text Expander ($35) offers a few more features than aText, and a mobile app that's crippled by iOS' rules and restrictions. While TextExpander is a fantastic alternative—and, in some ways, better—it's not a better value than aText. You'll pay seven times more for a very similar experience.

Typinator (24.99€) offers a similar feature set to the other text expansion apps but its price has only gone up. While it is, at the moment, slightly cheaper than TextExpander it doesn't work quite as well. When filling out custom form variables, for example, if the form window loses focus (i.e. you click outside of it) it just disappears. I contacted the developer about this issue and was told it's impossible to fix. TextExpander doesn't have this problem, and when I found the same issue in aText its developer fixed it in less than 24 hours.

DashExpander (Free, $3 Premium) has an unusual interface and can be a little weird to use at first, but is nonetheless a solid text expansion app. It's also your only free option, so if you don't want to pay anything at all it's the only way to go. While we still really like it, when our first and second choices only cost $5 we highly recommend supporting these developers by paying such a small fee for their excellent work.

Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.

You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Twitter's the best way to contact him, too.